Chapter 4 - Page 2

he had so often seen at church
was in the place next him and was evidently alone, as he also this
time happened to be. She was at first too absorbed in the
consideration of the programme to heed him, but when she at last
glanced at him he took advantage of the movement to speak to her,
greeting her with the remark that he felt as if he already knew
her. She smiled as she said "Oh yes, I recognise you"; yet in
spite of this admission of long acquaintance it was the first he
had seen of her smile. The effect of it was suddenly to contribute
more to that acquaintance than all the previous meetings had done.
He hadn't "taken in," he said to himself, that she was so pretty.
Later, that evening - it was while he rolled along in a hansom on
his way to dine out - he added that he hadn't taken in that she was
so interesting. The next morning in the midst of his work he quite
suddenly and irrelevantly reflected that his impression of her,
beginning so far back, was like a winding river that had at last
reached the sea.

His work in fact was blurred a little all that day by the sense of
what had now passed between them. It wasn't much, but it had just
made the difference. They had listened together to Beethoven and
Schumann; they had talked in the pauses, and at the end, when at
the door, to which they moved together, he had asked her if he
could help her in the matter of getting away. She had thanked him
and put up her umbrella, slipping into the crowd without an
allusion to their meeting yet again and leaving him to remember at
leisure that not a word had been exchanged about the usual scene of
that coincidence. This omission struck him now as natural and then
again as perverse. She mightn't in the least have allowed his
warrant for speaking to her, and yet if she hadn't he would have
judged her an underbred woman. It was odd that when nothing had
really ever brought them together he should have been able
successfully to assume they were in a manner old friends - that
this negative quantity was somehow more than they could express.
His success, it was true, had been qualified by her quick escape,
so that there grew up in him an absurd desire to put it to some
better test. Save in so far as some other poor chance might help
him, such a test could be only to meet her afresh at church. Left
to himself he would have gone to church the very next afternoon,
just for the curiosity of seeing if he should find her there. But
he wasn't left to himself, a fact he discovered quite at the last,
after he had virtually made up his mind to go. The influence that
kept him away really revealed to him how little to himself his Dead
EVER left him. He went only for THEM - for nothing else in the
world.

The